Few calendars
To date, there are only five hunting calendars published by Regions and autonomous Provinces and of these only one has included the wild dove (Streptopelia turtur) as a huntable species. It was enough for the myriad of small and large pseudo-environmentalist associations now mostly just anti-hunting, to raise the usual fuss made of catastrophic predictions of mass extinctions destined to influence public opinion by obtaining media visibility and perhaps a few more cards. Limiting ourselves to objective facts, the turtle dove is a species classified as "Vulnerable" in Europe, but "Near Threatened" in the European Union. Apparently these definitions appear worrying, but scientifically it means that EU populations are not currently a risk category.
Adaptive hunting management
However, the numerical contraction is detectable and this fact is not questioned by anyone, including the international hunting community. Precisely for this reason the turtle dove is the subject of two management plans - one international and one Italian - which both establish hunting management based on "adaptive harvesting". This precisely means "adapting" the quota of animals that can be removed - always a prudential percentage of the overall number of individuals - in relation to the state of the populations. During the international meetings held from 2020 to today on the species, a very rigid approach of the Commission on hunting activity emerged which pushes towards the "zero take" option, even when the mathematical model chosen to evaluate the impact of the game bag would allow a minimum withdrawal quota, simultaneously with the forecast of population growth. This is what happened at the time of the decision to suspend hunting in the western range, where the decline was much more marked: although the model left a possibility for a limited game bag, the Commission pushed for the moratorium.
Suspension proposal
The proposal for total suspension in the central-eastern area (in which most of the regions of our country fall) put forward by the Commission at the meeting of 19 April 2024 also appears too forced, also because three years of reduction in the levy exceeding the 50% did not lead to an increase in the rock dove population. This evidence obviously satisfies no one: neither the Commission nor environmentalists nor hunters. However, it demonstrates that hunting is not the main factor on which to act to protect the species. It is no coincidence that various countries did not agree with the Commission's moratorium proposal. Contrary to what is reported in the aforementioned letter from the protectionist associations, the possibility of carrying out an even smaller sampling compared to past seasons does not at all constitute a violation of article 7 of the Directive, but is simply an option provided for in the adaptive sampling, a tool which from no point of view, legislative or technical-scientific, is synonymous with an absolute ban on hunting, as they would like you to believe.
Habitat studies
The hunting associations want the wild dove population to return to satisfactory numerical levels, and are committed on this front with studies and actions on habitats, whose rarefaction and disappearance for reasons linked to changes in agricultural crops and territories are the real impacting factor on the demography of wild populations. At the same time, however, they cannot accept that harvesting plans are interpreted in an ideological and non-scientific way, especially when it is possible to establish national harvesting quotas that have no influence on the population dynamics of the species. The objective to be pursued, in the interest of the species and of "future generations" (to paraphrase the constitutional dictate of art.9) is to keep interest in the issue alive and to meticulously implement the management plan: on this we would like to see the strong activism of animal-environmentalist associations! Unfortunately, we have many demonstrations that in Italy, when bans are implemented instead of management, the result is disinterest and the abandonment of positive actions to solve the problem (Federcaccia Wildlife and Agro-Environmental Studies and Research Office).
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